The Hidden Divide That Shapes Our Politics

In my recent book, Crisis of the Common Good, I make the argument that our hyper-individualistic, market-obsessed culture has made us more isolated and less powerful. I think Donald Trump is a symptom of this spiritual unspooling. My book argues that happiness comes from a sense of connection and shared purpose with others, and that government should not outsource virtue or morality to private markets. I do not suggest the public sector should dictate one single version of the “good life.” I suggest it should instead seek, as an agent of the public will, to order our economy in a way that gives power and dignity to every actor in it, and our culture in a way that encourages communion and shared experience.

The Argument’s Jerusalem Demsas, in her critique “No, Senator Murphy, I don’t want to join your cult,” argues confidently for more or less a maintenance of the status quo. She warns, appropriately, that people’s freedom could be limited if government takes a position on right and wrong. If government can decide that price-gouging is immoral and thus subject to sanction, she cautions, then it can also decide that women’s free speech is immoral and subject to sanction as well. According to Demsas, any attempt by government to channel action toward a common good risks perversion into oppression and must therefore be fiercely guarded against. If people want moral instruction, let them find it in church or family, or let it be decided in the private marketplace. Anywhere but the public sphere.

Of course there is danger anytime the public sector involves itself in questions of morality or the purpose of a life well lived. Every discriminatory system in our nation’s history—from slavery to the disenfranchisement of women—took root in arguments about public morality.

But Demsas’s argument assumes that the democratic exercise of public power is a unique menace to people’s freedom, and that an absent, toothless public sector, indifferent to the common good, creates the true conditions for widespread freedom. That might sound plausible on paper, but a quick look around today’s America shows the opposite is true. Ask yourself: How has the wholesale outsourcing of norm-setting to the private sector gone for the American people?

Americans already live in a society that imposes one moral vision above all others. The chief virtue in our economy today is profit-making.

Any company that turns an enormous profit—no matter how it treats its workers, whether it strips communities bare, whether it makes a product of any social value at all—is treated as a successful company. In a virtue-less economy, our nation’s most treasured businesses are addicting children to suicide-inducing algorithms, creating jobs that don’t pay enough to let employees cover their bills, and speeding the nation toward the machine replacement of millions of jobs, if they don’t take out all of humanity first. And anybody who doesn’t commit their lives to the cult of profit-making is all but left for dead in our economy, forced into instability and uncertainty, as these morally liberated corporations mercilessly set the terms of their livelihoods.

Has that economic order left people feeling more powerful, more purposeful, more fulfilled? You know the answer: definitively no.

What about our current culture, in which we feel less bound to one another than ever before, in which young people spend more hours alone than in any period in recent memory, in which existence often amounts to buying more stuff rather than contributing to the common good or practicing basic neighborliness? Sure, the latest smartphone or the sponsored product promoted by your favorite influencer will deliver a quick hit of endorphins. But real contentment, I think, comes not from consumption but from joining in shared work and experience with real, not virtual, human beings. That’s not just my opinion; it’s supported by piles of research and data on human happiness and fulfillment.

Demsas reserves specific judgment for two arguments I make side by side: my criticism of a higher-education system that virtue signals four-year degrees over other kinds of job preparation, and my support for a new requirement that young people spend at least six months engaged in some form of public service. She seems to believe that preferring one kind of post–high school experience over another is an illegitimate exercise of public authority. But our government already has a massive stated preference when it spends far more on facilitating college than service experiences. Most importantly, our economy and culture raise the stakes of having a college degree to such an extent that the philosopher Michael Sandel calls it “the last acceptable prejudice.”

I am simply suggesting that we would be a stronger nation if we reduced the diploma divide in our society in part by having everyone spend a small portion of their formative years exercising their selflessness muscles through public service. Many Americans who spend their teenage years endlessly surfing spiritually empty algorithmic content would have their first meaningful encounter with the lost art of giving back. Maybe that brief immersion into the world of community service would even kindle a sense of shared purpose that stays with them for the rest of their lives. At worst, then, I am arguing for replacing one moral preference for college with a new preference for service.

Like Demsas, I do not believe politics is where people should find meaning. In fact, I worry that we excessively elevate our partisan political identities when other sources for communal identity—such as local identity or work identity—atrophy and the threads tying together our social fabric start to unravel. I think we are more bound to each other as a nation—and better off for it—when we make promises to one another about the social and moral floor every citizen stands on. I think it’s good to have public education and roads and police and fire protection and public libraries and retirement security, and I think a little more like that—universal post–high school training, a public service requirement, a guarantee of basic health care—would leave us all feeling more powerful and less alone.

In the end, Demsas’s argument defines a very important dividing line in modern American politics, which does not map neatly onto the controlling left/right, Democrat/Republican paradigm. Do we leave all our moral judgments to private life, even as giant corporations dominate our economy and Big Tech algorithms shape our culture? Do we believe that Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, and Elon Musk should hold the keys to how we all interact in daily life? Or do we set some moral norms in the public sector, which at least gives all of us a democratic chance to speak our minds?

I believe our nation needs more solidarity and more shared purpose in order to survive. And I don’t see that coming through more corporate overlordship, the inevitable result of Demsas’s hands-off approach to our society. Yes, I’m a progressive Democrat. But the basic view that government should set rules that give us more agency and make us feel less alone, and that this task cannot be ceded to “the market,” is shared by many Republicans and many who inhabit the traditional right. And there are many on the putative left, like Demsas, who prefer the market to set the rules of right and wrong.

Unmasking this often hidden divide, as Demsas’s review of my book does, is essential if we want an honest debate about what spiritually ails our broken nation, and what to do about it.